About Us

The creation of Slokie came about through the random collision of events. I, Kyle Archie (the founder), have a little girl who, when she was 3 or so, started asking my wife and I to make up bedtime stories involving incredibly specific places and characters. But, a common thread was that one of the characters had to be her. We quickly learned to adapt and developed a knack for making up bedtime stories on the fly.

Then, the pandemic hit. As a father of small children (we had a second kid in 2020), our tiny Brooklyn apartment was always littered with toys. With everything moving online, I quickly learned about our meeting software's background removal tool. As an engineer with a background in computer vision and machine learning, I quickly learned how to do this myself. This, combined with some skills I'd acquired while working on other machine learning projects, laid the foundation for what would become Slokie.

In the Spring of 2021, I started working on personalized children's books, and  in the fall, I had a working prototype. So I filed the paperwork, and founded Slokie, LLC.

While I had been telling my daughter versions of Nightlight for some time, I needed to find someone to bring the story to life. That's when I connected with Deepak Kumar Singh. Deepak is an Assistant Professor of Fine Arts at the Kanpur Institute of Technology by day, and an amazing freelance artist by night. I can't recommend him highly enough. Here's a link to his portfolio for those looking for some custom art with a fantasy feel. If you enjoyed Nightlight, please sign up for our mailing list, as I'll certainly be working with Deepak again on future books.